In the five days following the release of iOS 7, 200 million iOS users upgraded
their iPhones and iPads. Millions more bought new iPhones with iOS 7 preinstalled. There was a complete revamp of the look and feel. Organizations have had to revisit their apps to ensure that they work properly and look at home on this new version of iOS. But what about those who don’t upgrade to iOS 7? For a long time, perhaps two years, there will still be lots and lots of people using iOS 6* because they don’t want to upgrade or their phone doesn’t support iOS 7. Since you don’t want to turn away customers, you will need to support iOS 6 and iOS 7 for the next few years. Will this require you to maintain two completely different native applications?
New platforms
Apple isn’t the only device manufacturer in motion. The world of mobile is rapidly moving. There is clear convergence on supporting hybrid technologies, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 across iOS, Android, Windows and Blackberry. What about the up and coming players? Telefónica Vivo recently began selling the LG Fireweb and the Alcatel One Touch Fire Firefox OS smartphones in Brazil and other South American markets. Not to be left behind, the folks behind Ubunto Linux are working on Ubunto for phones. Which of these will take off and gain market share? I don’t know. But you will need to be able to easily provide your applications on whichever one starts to build mind share in your market. Are you prepared?
Mobile isn’t just smartphones
While all this smartphone news is great, there are still many feature phones in the market, and innovation is still happening on these older phones. Last year in India there were 200 million feature phones sold. IDC predicts that in 2017 1.5 billion smartphones will ship and this will only account for two-thirds of the mobile phones sold that year. And 2013 will be the first year that smartphones will outsell feature phones. During a recent trip, a colleague of mine came across and article discussing a startup delivering Harlequin romance novels for feature phones. Now, 200 million in India is fine, but what about Southeast Asia, where I live? According to BuzzCity, feature phones are still being used by 70 percent of Indonesia, 46 percent of Malaysia and 40 percent of Thailand. If you are a bank, an insurance company or a taxi booking service in these regions, do you want to engage these potential customers? If yes, you may want to add support for Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME) and SMS to your mobile strategy.
IBM Worklight 6.1, for all forms of mobile engagement
IBM Worklight supports native, hybrid and mobile web applications. It also provides infrastructure for those developing J2ME applications. ING Vysya, for example, is taking advantage of that support in order to provide a J2ME mobile banking application to bring banking to the rural population of India.
IBM Worklight 6.1 was released last Friday, providing support for two-way Short Message Service (SMS) mobility. You can define a client interaction that will be based on SMS messages but take advantage of the business application integrations and processes you are building for the smartphone applications.
How are you preparing to address differences in mobile OS market share in developing markets? Are you planning your mobile strategy for the complete set of customer segments you want to target? Join me on Twitter and let’s talk about the interesting ways you plan to use mobile technologies to target new customer segments in the developing markets.
*Call me old fashioned, but I’m still using iOS 6 and I love it.
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